Simputer Outcome

“Even the poorest of the poor will pay for a service, if that service improves in some way their quality of life. Examples of such services are Voice Mail, Railway and Bus Reservations, Health Services, Agricultural Produce Marketing, Rural/Micro Banking Services.”

-- from PicoPeta, producers of the first Simputer

"About 100 simputers -- indigenously produced, cheap, hand-held computers for the masses -- would be used to educate tribal students in Chhatisgarh. This will be the first field test of the simputer, invented by four scientists of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and technologists of the privately held Encore Software, since its launch in April. WorldSpace Radio and PicoPeta Simputers are collaborating in the pilot
project, which is to cover 2,000 students in the Bastar area of Chhatisgarh....

"The pilot project would be operational in six months, before the team moves
on to other proposals from Karnataka (for e-governance), Andhra Pradesh (for
poverty alleviation) and Tamil Nadu (for micro-credit). Simputers are also to be used for projects in the six other SAARc (South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation) countries -- Bangladesh,Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Pakistan...

"The teacher can put a smart card into the simputer to find out how much a
student has learnt. It need not be the usual syllabus-oriented content. It
could be anything that would enhance the knowledge base of the students,"
said Vijay Chandru, who was part of the Bangalore declaration in 1998 at the
BangaloreIT.com to produce a computer for the masses. "We can make do with much less bandwidth than a desktop because of the text to speech synthesiser. This text to speech capability has now been extended to Telugu that we will demonstrate to the Andhra Pradesh government," he added."

-- from "Simputer to help tribals Learn" by Imran Qureshi
Indo-Asian News Service, Bangalore, Sep 10, 2001